All about Internet Relay Chat

The “mIRC Unicode project” was successful it seems and Khaled Mardam-Bey just released version 7.1 of his famous IRC client.

The project to convert mIRC to Unicode has taken almost two years of development and testing and has required tens of thousands of changes to 150,000+ lines of source code. This has been the most complex and time-consuming update to mIRC since it was created in 1995, when it started out as a non-Unicode, 16-bit, Windows 3.1 application.

When looking at the changelog, there have been made well over 180 bugfixes and feature enhancements since mIRC 6.35 so it comes as no surprise that according to Khaled “many areas of mIRC have had to be updated or re-written” but should result in it “being faster, more stable, and more compatible with the latest versions of Windows”.

Aside from being converted to Unicode, the client gained a few new features too:

mIRC now supports configuration via UPnP which automatically opens ports for DCC on compatible routers and you may put it into full distraction fullscreen mode with the F11 key, starting from Beta 6.

You can take a look at the history of changes either on our own posting here or in the changelog that is supplied with the client itself which is available from the usual location, here.

0 Responses

Before I begin here, it should be known that I’m an avid and loyal mIRC user and have been since nearly day 1. However, it’s really kinda pointless to upgrade mIRC past v6 or even 5.9 if you don’t dcc (like me).

That’s because mIRC really hasn’t changed anything on the outside, it’s just bigger on the inside and breaks some pre-v6 scripts. There are no new features unless you think UTF8 is the bees knees. :/

I’m done upgrading until mIRC puts some real user friendly features on the table. IRC is melting away because authors aren’t doing anything but bug fixes. We are losing users daily because IR can’t keep up with the ease of use of IM’s and all the mytwitterbooks out there and in 5-7 years, I dare say, it’s going to vanish all together.

While I agree with you in terms of not upgrading mIRC, I do disagree on the point that IRC will completely disappear in the next 5-7 years.

The the majority of IM clients and facespaces out there do provide a new, more user friendly form of communication, but I don’t think they provide the exact same experience as an IRC channel. Chatrooms on AIM or Yahoo are largely bots and perverts, but you can still find decent IRC channels out there without too much effort. Sites like mibbit allow even the less savvy users to join through a “Web 2.0″ interface.

IRC may be declining (rapidly even), but I think it’ll stick around a niche form of communication for many years to come.

Snerfsays:

mIRC is also losing a lot of users to other clients as well, because they are tired of the same old thing. IRC may be on the decline as a whole, but it still gains a lot of popularity in the gaming world as clans of many different games use IRC as a chat medium.

Well after running 7.1 for a while I have officially rolled back to 6.35. 7.1 broke more of my script than I’m interested in fixing. I’d have to spend more time fixing my script than the value of unicode is to me, which is absolutely none.

So unless mIRC really comes out with something special and new .. I must say I’m done with it. 6.35 for the rest of the time I’m on IRC is the plan right now.

Quensionsays:

I switched away from mIRC to another client 9 years ago, so I’m no longer intimately familiar with it. However I often find myself in a technical-support role, which means I need to have some knowledge of mIRC, so every time a new version was released I’ve skimmed the changelog to try to keep myself up to date on what’s new and any major behavior changes.

When I saw that 7.x was converted to Unicode internally, I thought this was cool — another client with the infrastructure necessary to support international users on IRC in a better way. I saw the buzz about problems with scripts and so on, but understand that these issues inevitably appear with major changes like this and are often unavoidable with the complexity surrounding Unicode implementations.

At first glance this is a less than ideal but not terribly bad thing in the context of talking to people, as in channel and private messages. Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite cover the gravity of the situation; mIRC now uses UTF-8 for *everything*, which causes problems with server-level identifiers like nick and channel names: http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=223751

I encountered this today while helping someone who found himself in the bizarre situation of being unable to use his registered nick online, yet it worked perfectly via a web interface. The reason? He had a particular currency symbol in his password, one that isn’t in the ASCII range, and so fell into the codepage vs UTF-8 issue. The timing and strangeness of this problem was just bad enough that he didn’t make the connection with upgrading mIRC, and I can’t really blame him for that.

It will be interesting to see where mIRC goes from here. I must admit I’m surprised by its current stance given the sheer scale of issues involved; I would not have expected an attempt to force behavior like this.